terminological obscurity

[Arthur]

On Mon, 24 May 2004 11:51:37 -0700, Donn Cave <donn at u.washington.edu>
wrote:

>That's reasonable, but can you explain your hypothesis?
>Like, what is it about the current class/type structure
>that has anything to do with this?  I don't see it.

Well for one, before new style classes, it was easier to think of an
"instance" as in some sense a pseudo data type.  Instances of
different classes - even with no hierarchical relationship - were more
conceptually homogenous. 

But with everything subclassable,  2 different classes, each derived
from object, are conceptually distinguished more similarly to the way
in which a str and int are distinguished.

So in quoteth Guido from the same thread:

    GvR> I always think of the type of a list as "list of T" while I
    GvR> think of a tuple's type as "tuple of length N with items of
    GvR> types T1, T2, T3, ..., TN".  So [1, 2] and [1, 2, 3] are both
    GvR> "list of int" (and "list of Number" and "list of Object", of
    GvR> course) while ("hello", 42) is a "2-tuple with items str and
    GvR> int" and (42, "hello", 3.14) is a "3-tuple with items int,
    GvR> str, float".

He sort of stacks the cards by making his tuples of hetereogenous
type, and his list easily described as a list of T. And thereby
sidesteps all the ambiguities inherent in the ten word edict.  Except
that at the Object level, we are at lists of Objects and tuples of
Objects.  It detracts little from the point of the above quote, but
this quote then becomes substantially weaker as support for his 10
worder.

Is the best I can express it.

>
>As far as the group dynamics & Guido go, you can probably
>forget that.  There are all kinds of things going on, and
>that could play a role, but only a weak one.  People have
>a lot of strong opinions about programming languages, and
>if people here seem to find it easy to agree with Guido,
>the simplest explanation is that they choose to use Python
>and hang out on comp.lang.python because they like it.

I like Python and choose to hang on Python  list, and find it easy to
disagree with Guido.  But that only occurs head-on when he ventures
into non-technical areas were I consider the playing field more even.
And this depsite the fact I would have no problem granting him a
higher IQ.  Since I have lived in close quarters with higher IQs, and
have a pretty developed sense, I think, of what that buys you, and
what it doesn't.

Art